Editor’s note: This a continuation of a series of articles on low cost gardening. See Tip#1 on planning; Tip #2 on Soil; Tip # 3 on Compost; Tip # 4 on Tools.

Gardens are a thing of beauty. A little greenery or a lot, containers or plots of dirt, bushy plants or vines, a garden can provide infinite variety in color, structure, shape, and scent. The intoxicating presence of lush vegetation can awaken your artistic senses.

But gardening can deplete your financial resources, if you aren’t careful. If you’ve got the budget, you can afford the time-saving products and devices within your means. If you don’t have the budget, don’t give up! There are a lot of ways to garden with very low or no expenditure of funds.

A lot of what I’m sharing here is information I’ve gleaned from obsessive watching of YouTube videos, reading lots of articles and plant studies, and my own successes and failures. I am not an expert gardener — far from it! Just sharing what I’ve learned.

Here’s hoping these tips help.

WHETHER you’re doing container gardening or growing in the ground, you may want to have a variety of containers at various stages of your planting. For example, starting plants from seeds is easily done in small containers or trays. This can be helpful to prevent birds or chickens from eating your seeds if you direct sow into the ground; it can help you plant only the strongest, most viable plants into your soil.

Cheap and easy. You can collect items to use as seed containers and trays easily from things you use. Some items that make good seed starting containers include toilet paper rolls, newspapers (you can make into origami cups), individual serving containers like yogurt containers and applesauce and fruit cups. You can collect Styrofoam coffee cups or red plastic cups used at family events — just wash them well first. You can use pie tins or other foil trays. You can use egg cartons; some have had good luck with these although I didn’t. Always punch drainage holes in your seed starting cups or trays.

Your first transplant can be into larger containers that are not the final homes for the plants, even if you’re doing container gardening or in-the-ground planting.

Cheap and easy. Some containers I found particularly helpful and useful for my first transplant of seedlings were quart milk boxes (Gossner’s UHT 1% being my favorite), large juice boxes (like Florida orange juice), cereal boxes and particularly the wax bags inside the cereal boxes. You can also purchase soft black plastic cups (about 2 cup size) for just 9¢ each (Ace Hardware).

When it’s time for your plant’s final home, consider carefully. If you’re planting directly into the ground, be sure to research your plant’s needs and choose the best place. Does it need lots of direct sunlight? Or does it benefit from some sun and some indirect light or shade? Does it like well-draining soil? Or prefer wet and marshy conditions? How deep should it go? Can you protect it from the life in your neighborhood? For example, my various neighbors and family have pigs and goats that get loose and love to visit my yard; and there are boonie chickens and roaming boonie dogs and cats in my area. Each presents a challenge for me planting directly into the ground, even if I were able to find a place where there’s more soil than mountain rock.

Another option, if you have ground, but it’s not deep dirt or good quality is to build and use a raised bed. Some boards, concrete blocks, sheets of tin, or other materials for building low walls are all you need.

This is perhaps the most inexpensive raised bed you can build! Wooden pallets are seen as either a fire hazard or industrial waste so you can very easily get your hands on a few for free. By splitting the pallet effectively and saving the nails, you will have all you need to build a surprisingly sturdy and nice looking raised bed. Plus depending on the size of the pallet you can look at a raised bed around 1ft high and 4x4ft. Which will be able to grow you a very nice amount of food!

It took me about 15 minutes to build, and cost about $40 to make. Of course, you could save more if you used salvaged materials, but I wanted this to be applicable to people that don't have anything lying around the house.

How to build a raised bed garden, anyone can do this!

Concrete blocks (not cinder), bulk potting soil, bulk, top soil, bulk cow manure compost, 1/2" PVC hoops, netting material. It only took 3 hours to make and another 1.5 hours to shovel in the fill material. Built in a day to last a lifetime. Tips for your raised bed.

Fill material: blended topsoil and potting mix in bulk then I added a top layer of cow manure compost and mixed it in. The PVC hoops are just 1/2" PVC tubing 10' long from the plumbing area of Lowes, Home Depot, Ace Hardware or your local supplier. The cover material is 'Garden Mesh Netting' by Farer; 10' by 33'.

If you’re planting into containers, you’ll need a final home for your plant that is suitable in size. Tomatoes, for example, are generally best in a container 18 inches in diameter and at least 12 inches deep. Cherry tomato and dwarf varieties may succeed in smaller pots. Citrus trees, avocado trees, mango trees are all going to need huge containers eventually — at least 20 pound or larger, and probably best put into the ground at some point, if you can. With mango trees, the advice from experts is to keep the pot smaller until you must expand. Mangos like crowded spaces for a while, before the roots need more space.

Almost cheap, almost easy. It’s difficult to find large containers like this for an inexpensive price. If you have friends in construction, you might get some free 5 gallon paint buckets, or you might find similar kinds of buckets that are food grade at some restaurants and hotels. These can work for many plants —but you’ll have to drill holes into the bottom and around the sides at an inch or two above the bottom, so that they can drain adequately.

You can use the plastic milk jugs or plastic water jugs, cutting off the top to open up to the wide space. Depending on size, these might work only for the first transplant and not as a forever home, but if sufficiently large, or you have a small plant, they might work also to sustain a plant through harvest. Again, you’d need to drill or punch holes for drainage.

There’s a medium size pot (light black plastic) that may work for some available at Ace Hardware for just 69¢ and you may find other choices at I Love Saipan or True Value or where ever you like to shop for gardening supplies.

Another option is to use the cloth bags available for grocery shopping (offered to encourage you to reduce plastic bag use). These can hold a few gallons and would work well for herbs or smaller plants like a pepper plant or a bush bean. You might even get a cherry or dwarf tomato to work well in one of these.

Another low cost option is to use cardboard boxes that you get from a store. These deteriorate quickly, but there are uses for them. Watch the video!

Planting POTATOES In FREE Containers SIMPLE and EASY. See HOW To plant and grow potatoes. Simple and Easy way to get huge Harvests.

And again, you can use an old laundry basket, but you’ll need some cloth or other liner with holes, that will still permit air and drainage to occur.

You can check whether you have any old foam coolers to use. These would need holes punched into the bottom for drainage.

Caution: You can use old tires in gardening in the yard. You’ll need a space over some earth preferably where they lay flat so the soil doesn’t wash out of them, but they can still drain down into the ground. But I’d recommend limiting these to flowers because tires are toxic. You don’t want them leaching toxins into the dirt where you’re growing your vegetables.

Pretty much any container can be used for vegetable gardening, so long as it isn’t toxic. And for flowers and greenery, as long as you keep it away from your vegetable garden, you can use anything.

I opted for re-usable grow bags. You can buy fabric and make these yourself, or just buy the bags at online stores like Amazon. These range in price for 5 gallon grow bags from $3/bag to $1.65 each depending on whether you buy a few (pack of 5) or a lot (pack of 20), and always plus shipping (unless you have a friend who gets Amazon Prime, free shipping). Although these are an investment, there is evidence they can last for many years, with washing and care in between uses. Always be sure to wash containers well before re-using them.

One more container that you’ll need plenty of is bottles. You want half gallon bottles (like bottles that apple juice or cranberry juice comes in) so you can mix up fertilizer solutions for watering the plants or foliar solutions for spraying them; you’ll want bottles to have at your work station when you’re watering seeds, like the ReaLemon bottle. You’ll want bottles that you can cut apart and use for planters or for trays under the planters so you have water on hand for your potted plants.

Containers are one of the easiest gardening jobs that you can do on a budget!

Good luck and happy gardening.

(This is not a scientific poll.)